Sports such as hockey which entail rough physical contact require special protective equipment. A common protective measure is the use of padded gloves, which typically consist of flexible palm and finger stalls sewed to sections of padding along the back of the hand. This provides significant protection to the player's hands, since the palm side of the hand is generally closed around a hockey stick and therefore not exposed to potentially injurious activity.
However, this also has the undesirable effect of reducing the flexibility of the player's hands, which can significantly impact on the ability to grasp an object such as a hockey stick, puck, ball or the like. Conventional hockey gloves have typically reflected a balance between the maximum thickness and amount of padding, for protection of the hands, and the need for some degree of flexibility or dexterity to enable the player to achieve an acceptable level of performance. Thus, conventional hockey gloves have evolved to utilize sections of padding strategically positioned across the back of the glove, to permit the greatest possible flexibility while still providing the necessary protection.
In practise, however, the dexterity of the player is invariably decreased by the hockey glove. Even though the divisions between sections of padding are located to roughly correspond with the joints in the player's hand, the web of material connecting adjacent sections still reduces flexibility considerably. The alternative, which is to leave large gaps between sections of padding at the points of greatest flexure, is both impractical and dangerous. The joints of the finger are especially prone to injury in a contact sport, and must therefore be well protected, yet it is at these very joints where the largest degree of flexibility for grasping purposes is required. Moreover, it is impractical to separate the padding at the medial-distal joint, resulting in almost no freedom of movement for the distal phalange of the finger, which is important to efficient grasping of an object.